In this blog post I will show how to set up custom error pages in ASP.NET MVC 3 applications to create user-friendly error messages instead of the (yellow) IIS default error pages for both “normal” (non-AJAX) requests and jQuery AJAX requests.

In this showcase we will implement custom error pages to handle the HTTP error codes 404 (“Not Found”) and 500 (“Internal server error”) which I think are the most common errors that could occur in web applications. In a first step we will set up the custom error pages to handle errors occurring in “normal” non-AJAX requests and in a second step we add a little JavaScript jQuery code that handles jQuery AJAX errors. We start with a new (empty) ASP.NET MVC 3 project and activate custom errors in the Web.config by adding the following lines under <system.web>:

Note: You can set mode=”Off” to disable custom errors which could be helpful while developing or debugging. Setting mode=”RemoteOnly” activates custom errors only for remote clients, i.e. disables custom errors when accessing via http://localhost/[...]. In this example setting mode=”On” is fine since we want to test our custom errors. You can find more information about the <customErrors> element here.

In a last step we add the ErrorController‘s views (Views/Error/NotFound.cshtml and Views/Error/InternalServerError.cshtml) that defines the (error) pages the end user will see in case of an error. The views include a partial view defined in Views/Shared/Error/NotFoundInfo.cshtml respectively Views/Shared/Error/InternalServerErrorInfo.cshtml that contains the concrete error messages. As we will see below using these partial views enables us to reuse the same error messages to handle AJAX errors.

To handle errors occurring in (jQuery) AJAX calls we will use jQuery UI to show a dialog containing the error messages. In order to include jQuery UI we need to add two lines to Views/Shared/_Layout.cshtml:

To test the custom errors you can launch the project and click one of the four links defined in the view above. The “AJAX links” should open a dialog containing the error message and the “non-AJAX” links should redirect to a new page showing the same error message.

Summarized this blog post shows how to set up custom errors that handle errors occurring in both AJAX requests and “non-AJAX” requests. Depending on the project, one could customize the example code shown above to handle other HTTP errors as well or to show more customized error messages or dialogs.

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data Center ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to use an action filter to log user tracking information in an ASP.NET MVC app. The below action filter will take logged user name, controller name, action name, timestamp information and the value of route data id. These user tracking information will be logged using log4net logging framework.

Routing in an ASP.NET module is responsible for mapping incoming browser requests to a particular MVC controller action.

When Requests arrive to an ASP.NET MVC-based web application it actually first passes through the UrlRoutingModule object, which is an HTTP module.

This module parses the request; i.e. the request from the URL and performs route selection. The UrlRoutingModule object selects the first route object that matches the current request.

If no routes match, the UrlRoutingModule object does nothing and lets the request fall back to the regular ASP.NET or IIS request processing.

Now From the selected Route object, the UrlRoutingModule object contains the IRouteHandler object that is associated with the Route object. This is an instance of MvcRouteHandler. The IRouteHandler instance creates an IHttpHandler object that passes it the IHttpContext object. By default, the IHttpHandler instance for MVC is the MvcHandler object. The MvcHandler object then selects the controller that will ultimately handle the request.

See when an ASP.NET MVC web application runs in IIS 7.0, no file name extension is required for MVC projects. So you cannot find the .aspx,.ascx,.asmx extension.

Now when you create a new ASP.NET MVC application, it will automatically configure to use ASP.NET Routing. ASP.NET Routing is set up in two places:

1. Webconfig File 2. Global.asax file

Now interestingly when you create a MVC2 application a route table is automatically created in the application's Global.asax file.

As we all know the Global.asax contains event handlers for ASP.NET application lifecycle events. The route table is created during the Application Start event. So when you open the Global.asax file you will see the following code:

Conclusion: So in this article we have seen what the functionality of routing in ASP.Net MVC 3 is.

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data Center ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

When developing ASP.NET MVC3 application one often needs to add similar actions to different controllers; for example controllers that enable the user to perform the basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations typically contain action methods like Create(), Update() or Delete(). To avoid duplicate code a simple solution could be a common base controller. In complex applications this approach could have some limitations, since .NET does not support multi inheritance, e.g. each controller could have only one base controller.

This blog post shows a prototypically approach how to implement action methods that can be used in more than one controller with the help of the re-mix library which adds mixins support to .NET. Since the approach shown below is only a proof of concept, it has some limitations that are listed at the end of the post.

After downloading re-mix and adding references to the dll files contained in the folder net-3.5\bin\release one need a custom controller factory that uses remix’s ObjectFactory to create the controller objects:

public IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName){// Use the default ControllerFactory to get the type of the controllervar controllerType = _defaultControllerFactory.CreateController(requestContext, controllerName).GetType();

// Use remix's ObjectFactory to instantiate the (mixed) controllerreturn(IController)ObjectFactory.Create(controllerType);}

Due to security reasons ASP.NET MVC only allows to call action methods that are defined in a class that inherits System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase. Since re-mix creates (automatically generated) proxy objects with their own inheritance structures, ASP.NET MVC does not find the Echo action by default. To bypass this limitation we implement a custom RemixControllerActionInvoker that allows calling actions that are defined in implementations of the IEchoControllerMixin interface. To do this we use reflection to call a non-public ASP.NET MVC functionality that creates an ActionDescriptor that skip the security check:

To test the Echo action in both controllers, just open http://localhost:[...]/Controller1/Echo/Hello or http://localhost:[...]/Controller2/Echo/Hello.

Summarized mixins enable adding actions to controllers without the need of a common base controller; actions defined in mixins are completely decoupled from any inheritance structure and can be added to any controller.

As written in introduction, the approach shown above is only prototypical and has some limitations (which should be resolvable with some additional logic/code):

1. Since the mixin overrides the CreateActionInvoker() of the controller that is “intermixed”, one could neither use more than one mixin in one controller nor use a custom CreateActionInvoker() method.

2. In actions defined in mixins one does not have access to the protected ASP.NET MVC controller methods that create ActionResult objects like View(), PartialView(), Json(), Content(), …

3. One needs to use reflection to call a protected ReflectedActionDescriptor constructor.

4. The RemixControllerActionInvoker implementation does not consider the action parameter when creating the action descriptor. In result the action names defined in the mixins needs to be unique.

In this article I will describe how to set the Web configuration file in ASP.Net MVC 3 using Entity Framework with object class mapping.

In your ASP.Net MVC 3 applications supposes you are using object class mapping using Entity Framework.

That means you write your classes using relationships and the classes will be converted to a table in the database. For that you have to set your Web .config file connection string setting. Because the connection string results in mapping a class to a table in the database and the data from the table will also come from the database.

Step 1:

First go to the Web config page for the main project like Figure 1:

Step 2:

Then comment the existing connection string code. (The existing code will not work for creating the tables from the mapping classes (POCO) classes).

After that paste the code shown below like figure 2:

So in this article we have learned how to change the connection string in the web.config file for ASP.Net MVC 3 using Entity Framework.

"When should I use a ViewBag vs. ViewData vs. TempData objects?" -- a frequent question in online forums, during presentations, and at events. There are enough similarities and differences between these objects that warrant a closer look to see exactly how you can use each of these objects while developing MVC applications.

All three objects are available as properties of both the view and controller. As a rule of thumb, you'll use the ViewData, ViewBag, and TempData objects for the purposes of transporting small amounts of data from and to specific locations (e.g., controller to view or between views). Both the ViewData and ViewBag objects work well in the following scenarios:

·Incorporating dropdown lists of lookup data into an entity

·Components like a shopping cart

·Widgets like a user profile widget

·Small amounts of aggregate data

While the TempData object works well in one basic scenario:

·Passing data between the current and next HTTP requests

If you need to work with larger amounts of data, reporting data, create dashboards, or work with multiple disparate sources of data, you can use the more heavy duty ViewModel object. See the details post about ViewModels at here.

ViewData & ViewBag objects

- ViewData

ViewData is a dictionary object that you put data into, which then becomes available to the view. ViewData is a derivative of the ViewDataDictionary class, so you can access by the familiar "key/value" syntax.

- ViewBag

The ViewBag object is a wrapper around the ViewData object that allows you to create dynamic properties for the ViewBag.

Both the ViewData and ViewBag objects are great for accessing extra data (i.e., outside the data model), between the controller and view. Since views already expect a specific object as their model, this type of data access to extra data, MVC implements it as a property of both views and controllers, making usage and access to these objects easy.

The syntax and usage of the ViewBag, ViewData, and TempData objects are outlined in the following code sample, which populates a featured product object that a view renders as in a bakery's home page:

The Index.cshtml view renders the Product object by accessing the code with the same syntax as in the controller. Notice that you'll have to cast the ViewData and TempData objects, but not the ViewBag.

The ViewBag object lets you add dynamic properties to it which makes it a very versatile tool.

Although all three display something when this view renders, but the TempData can be troublesome when used in this manner, and here's why...

TempData

TempData is meant to be a very short-lived instance, and you should only use it during the current and the subsequent requests only! Since TempData works this way, you need to know for sure what the next request will be, and redirecting to another view is the only time you can guarantee this. Therefore, the only scenario where using TempData will reliably work is when you are redirecting. This is because a redirect kills the current request (and sends HTTP status code 302 Object Moved to the client), then creates a new request on the server to serve the redirected view. Looking back at the previous HomeController code sample means that the TempData object could yield results differently than expected because the next request origin can't be guaranteed. For example, the next request can originate from a completely different machine and browser instance.

As described below, the syntax for using TempData is the same as ViewData.

//After the redirect, the ViewBag & ViewData objects are no longer available//Only TempData survives a redirect

returnnew RedirectResult(@"~\Featured\");}

However, once the controller redirects, the ViewBag and ViewData will contain null values. If you inspect the TempData object with debugging tools after the redirect you'll see that it is fully populated with a featured product. This is because the redirect is that only, subsequent, request, so only it can access the TempData object without worry.

The customary Session object is the backing store for the TempData object, and it is destroyed more quickly than a regular session, i.e., immediately after the subsequent request. Because of its short lived scope, it's great for passing error messages to an error page.

Now that you've seen how and when to use ViewData, ViewBag, and TempData objects, you might be wondering what to do when using larger sets of data or more complex scenarios. Fortunately, MVC has ways to deal with these commonly needed scenarios.

Thinking outside the ViewBag

Your requirements might need you to represent the following types of data, which do not fit in well when using ViewBag, ViewData, or TempData objects. The MVC 3 framework contains ViewModel objects for when you need more than ViewData. The type of data that suits ViewModels well is as follows:

·Master-detail data

·Larger sets of data

·Complex relational data

·Reporting and aggregate data

·Dashboards

·Data from disparate sources

You'll likely run into these or similar scenarios during the app development process.

Summary

The ViewData and ViewBag objects give you ways to access those extra pieces of data that go alongside your model, however for more complex data, you can move up to the ViewModel. TempData, on the other hand, is geared specifically for working with data on HTTP redirects, so remember to be cautious when using TempData.

The concept of the ViewModel isn't just for ASP.NET MVC, as you'll see references to ViewModels throughout the web in articles and blog posts about the MVC, MVP, and MVVM patterns. Those posts and articles can center around any number of technologies such as ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, or MVC... This post will investigate ViewModels as they apply to the world of ASP.NET MVC.

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data CenterASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

The concept of the ViewModel isn't just for ASP.NET MVC, as you'll see references to ViewModels throughout the web in articles and blog posts about the MVC, MVP, and MVVM patterns. Those posts and articles can center around any number of technologies such as ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, or MVC... This post will investigate ViewModels as they apply to the world of ASP.NET MVC.

What is an ASP.NET MVC ViewModel?

In ASP.NET MVC, ViewModels allow you to shape multiple entities from one or more data models or sources into a single object, optimized for consumption and rendering by the view. The below image illustrates the concept of a ViewModel:

The purpose of a ViewModel is for the view to have a single object to render, alleviating the need for UI logic code in the view that would otherwise be necessary. This means the only responsibility, or concern, of the view is to render that single ViewModel object, aiding in a cleaner separation of concerns (SoC). Concerns are distinct aspects of the application that have a particular purpose (i.e., concern), and keeping these aspects apart means your application is more organized, and the code more focused. Putting data manipulation code in its own location away from the view and controller, enforces SoC.

Using ViewModels in MVC for finer granularity and better SoC leads to more easily maintainable and testable code. Remember, unit testing is about testing small units.

Along with better coding practices, there are many business reasons demonstrating why you might consider using ViewModels:

·Incorporating dropdown lists of lookup data into a related entity

·Master-detail records view

·Pagination: combining actual data and paging information

·Components like a shopping cart or user profile widget

·Dashboards, with multiple sources of disparate data

·Reports, often with aggregate data

The above scenarios are common to a wide variety of applications, and deal with more complex data than basic CRUD forms-over-data page (e.g., a simple 1:1 mapping to the db table). For example, providing a list of states, and ensuring that the state that matches the state of current customer, means that you need to either provide two sets of data or a single set of customer/state data combined, as shown in the image below.

Some scenarios such as a lookup table representing states in the USA, could easily work with either ViewModels or a ViewBag/ViewData object, so there is some potential overlap at times. It's up to the application architects and developers to decide what works best with their exact use case.

Creating a ViewModel

Although a ViewModel consists of multiple entities, at its core a ViewModel is still just a class - and one that doesn't even inherit from anything special, as many MVC classes do.

Physically, ViewModels can exist in different locations, listed below:

·In a folder called ViewModels that resides in the root of the project. (small apps)

·As a .dll referenced from the MVC project (any size app)

·In a separate project(s) as a service layer, for large applications that generate view/content specific data. (enterprise apps)

Since a ViewModel is just a class, the easiest way to get started using one is to create a new folder named ViewModels and add a new code file to it.

To create the CustomerViewModel ViewModel, add the Customer and StatesDictionary types as properties to form one CustomerViewModel class. In the example below, the CustomerViewModel class contains the newly defined properties.

Generally, ViewModels contain the word "ViewModel" as part of its name; however, the conventions at work here are for consistency in code readability, since other classes in MVC state their intents in their names as well (e.g., names of controllers, action methods, etc...use conventions in their names).

The StatesDictionary class is a simple Dictionary object containing two type parameters of type string. The class also contains the definitions for all the members in the Dictionary (i.e., the state data). The only property in the StatesDictionary class is the StateSelectList, which is an object that Html Helpers use with to render an HTML <select> element that displays a listing of states. The type Dictionary<string, string> in the StateSelectList property maps to the state abbreviation then state name, respectively.

Data that lives in small lists and infrequently changes, like the StatesDictionary class, exists in all types of applications. In real world applications, you'll find a variety of methods for dealing with lookup data such as a list of states - often XML files and SQL tables. You can replace the code in the StateDictionary method to use entities from Entity Framework, read data from files, or any data access code that you require.

After creating the ViewModel, the next steps are to instantiate it in a controller and return it to the view.

Getting the ViewModel to the view

Starts with the controller...

Sending a ViewModel to the view for rendering will work the same as when dealing with a model. Since it's just a class, the view doesn't know, and doesn't care, where the model or ViewModel came from. You can create the instance of the ViewModel class in the controller, or resolve it if using an IoC container. Remember that just as you would do with views, you should keep controllers clean of unnecessary code, meaning that only code that fetches the model or ViewModel belongs here, and little more.

In order for the view to know what object to use, set the @model keyword to point to the ViewModel, just like you already would with a regular model.

@model FourthCoffee.Web.ViewModels.CustomerViewModel

Because the Customer object is a property of the ViewModel, you'll see the model.Class.Property syntax to access the ViewModel data, similar to the following line of code.<divclass="editor-label">@Html.LabelFor(model => model.Customer.FirstName)</div><divclass="editor-field">@Html.EditorFor(model => model.Customer.FirstName)@Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Customer.FirstName)</div>@* ...View code continues rendering properties... *@

Additionally, you can edit the Edit/Create views so that the DropDownList containing a list of the states will display, and display the correct state matching that of the customer.

As you might have noticed, using a ViewModel is just as easy as using the ViewBag or ViewData objects. ViewModels, however, provide those extra benefits like being easier to test and optimize.

Checking the results

After a user navigates to the /Customers/Edit/1 URL in the browser, the Razor view engine renders the CustomerViewModel similarly to the following screen shot.

The State DropDownList displays the states and the current state for that customer, as expected.

Digging Further into ViewModels

Because ViewModels render pre-manipulated data that no longer have those 1:1 mappings between model classes and database tables, you'll need to do create mappings yourself. You can manually map small ViewModels, but this will quickly become burdensome when mapping larger classes, especially when working with parent-child-grandchild, multi-level, or complex data. This is where a tool such as AutoMapper comes into play. AutoMapper will let you fluently setup mappings between ViewModels and models more easily than doing so manually, or writing your own mapper.

Here are some tips for using ViewModels:

·Put only data that you'll render in the ViewModel.

·The view should direct the properties of the ViewModel, this way it fits better for rendering and maintenance.

·Use a mapper when ViewModels become complex.

Some tools that can help assist you in generating POCOs (Plain Old CLR Objects) for models and ViewModels are:

You should always prefer using a ViewModel rather than instantiating multiple models and putting that manipulation code in the controller.

Summary

ViewModels help you organize and manage data in MVC applications when you need to work with more complex data than the other objects allow. Using ViewModels gives you the flexibility to use data as you see fit. ViewModels area generally a more flexible way to access multiple data sources than models + ViewBag/ViewData objects.

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data CenterASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

If you want to change the location of the shared folder in your MVC 3 App, then this is a must read.

When you create a new MVC 3 Web Application Project, a default folder structure is created for you that looks something like this:

To change the shared folder location you must do the following steps.

1. Move the Shared Folder to the Root

Just drag the shared folder out of the views folder to the root of your app, like so:

2. Copy the web.config

In order for the shared folder to work outside the views folder, it has to have a special web.config file within it. Just copy the one inside the views folder and paste it into the shared folder.

3. Edit the _ViewStart.vbhtml Page

Now that the _layout page has changed its locations, we have to modify the _ViewStart.vbhtml page located in the Views folder, and edit the following:

Remove the “/Views” so now it directs to the _layout page located in the new shared folder location.

4. Code a Custom View Engine

If you tried to browse the site, now you will get an error like this one:

That is happening because MVC is using the default locations for the partial views, so it's still looking for the _LogOnPartial.vbhtml in its old location, but you moved that file to a new location in the root of your app.

To change the default file location for the whole site, we need to create a new class that inherits from RazorViewEngine.

Now if you run the app, you will notice that it all works with the shared folder new location.

Summary

We managed to change the shared folder location and replace the default razor view engine with our own implementation that changes the locations of the master, views, and partial views of the app.

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data CenterASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

One of the strong features to come in MVC 2 was the ability to create metadata classes that allowed you to specify the metadata that was linked to the model. You could decorate properties with the StringLength, Range and RegularExpression attribute. Sometimes you want to add HTML attributes to your elements, say if you want to set the tab index for an input control. You could do this, but then you’re adding extra mark-up that could be placed elsewhere:

Calling the base class you can find the metadata for the property. One of the properties is AdditonalValues. This value gets a dictionary that contains additional metadata about the model. Basically what’s happening in the code above is when the view is rendered, the framework will look through all the attributes associated to the property. If it finds an attribute called AdditionalHtml (which we haven’t created yet), it will add it the properties AdditionalValues property. Make sense? Let’s add the AdditionalHtml class now:

The class is intended to be used as an attribute, hence why it’s deriving from Attribute. There’s one public method called OptionalAttributes, and all that does is add values to a dictionary and returns that. This dictionary will be used as the input for the AdditionalValues in the previous section. The public properties relate to attributes you can use on HTML input’s, such as readonly, maxlength and css classes.

To use this new attribute, you need to decorate the properties in your metadata class like this:

This class is linked to the model, Employee, by using the MetadataType attribute:

And finally to use this, I’m using a templated helper to output the view. Because the two properties are strings, the templated helper must be called string.cshtml and reside in the EditorTemplates folder

The final step is to let the framework know it should use this as the default ModelMetadataProvider. This is done through the global.asax file:

When the view is rendered, the framework uses the templated helper to display any properties whose data type is string. If it finds one, it grabs the metadata and checks if it’s been decorated with the AdditionalHtml attribute. If it does, it renders that as the additional html attributes. The result is below:

Happy programming!

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data CenterASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

If you are a Facebook Application developer working classical ASP.NET, you are probably familiar with the Facebook Developer Toolkit. This tool comes with a great set of server side controls that ease a lot of the developer’s job. But if you are like me and that you want to enjoy ASP.NET MVC, then you cannot use those server side controls that easily, so MVC Addon project might be of great help. The MVC Addon will help overcome differences in the rendering and resource requesting differences between classical ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC.

But when it comes to integrating Facebook Connect with ASP.NET MVC, a few things need to be changed from steps explained in classical ASP.NET tutorials. This article is about overcoming those difficulties. So lets get started.

First, you will need to add the following code to your Site.Master file:

We’re done! When the user clicks on the Facebook Connect button, the Facebook login window pops up. After the user has entered the login information, the pop up closes and your website’s browser window will refresh. From here you can start reading the cookie for the user information and other stuff.

Hope this tutorial can help!

Reasons whyyou must trustASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to whatASPHostPortaldoes. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL HardwareDell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.- Recovery SystemsRecovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.- Control PanelWe provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.- Excellent Expertise in TechnologyThe reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.- Data CenterASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security- Monitoring ServicesFrom the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.- NetworkASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.- SecurityNetwork security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.- Support ServicesEngineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

About ASPHostPortal.com

We’re a company that works differently to most. Value is what we output and help our customers achieve, not how much money we put in the bank. It’s not because we are altruistic. It’s based on an even simpler principle. "Do good things, and good things will come to you".

Success for us is something that is continually experienced, not something that is reached. For us it is all about the experience – more than the journey. Life is a continual experience. We see the Internet as being an incredible amplifier to the experience of life for all of us. It can help humanity come together to explode in knowledge exploration and discussion. It is continual enlightenment of new ideas, experiences, and passions